Today I am going to show you how to do email outreach using only free tools.

The free tools will be:

Tagpacker

Google Sheets

Gmail

Zapier

Hunter.io

YAMM

I will show you exactly, step by step, how to do your email outreach using these tools.

Let’s dive right in.

1. Register for a Google Account

For this method to work you will need a Google Account. You can use your existing account, but, for pedagogical purposes, I will go on and use a brand new account. There is also the privacy factor to take into consideration since some of the tools we will be using require access to your Google Account, which you might not want to give.

The exact steps to create an account is so simple I won’t describe it here.

Anyways, you should end up something like this if you decided on a brand new account.

2. Install Tagpacker

Tagpacker is a free tool to manage bookmarks. We will use it to easily save interesting websites that fit your purpose for email outreach. You can either add websites manually at the Tagpacker website. But, it also comes with a handy Chrome plugin called “Pack It”, which will make our job easy peasy.

Firstly, head over to tagpacker.com and register for an account (you must confirm your email).

For me, I did a search for product management blogs and stepped across Roman Pichler’s website, which I will use as an example. All I had to do then was to open up “Pack It” (or ctrl+shift+z) and save it.

The above screenshots show that you have the option to add extra information about the site, this can be useful later on if you want to segment and customize your outreach emails.

When you saved a website it will show up at your page in tagpacker.com like this:

3. Connect Tagpacker with Google Sheets using Zapier

So far, things have been pretty easy. But now, it will get a little bit more complicated.

The goal here is to automatically add the links we save to Tagpacker to a Google Sheet.

The first thing you need to do it to go here and add a Zap for Tagpacker. Of course, if you don’t have already, you will need to register for a Zapier account.

You should end up here:

The next step is to connect Zapier with Tagpacker. In order to do so, you will need to add an API-key. This key is found in your Tagpacker account after you click the “Create key” link.

Just copy and paste that key here:

The next step can be a little bit confusing. You need to enter your user ID. That is the first part of your API-key.

For example in this API-key, the orange part is your user ID.

5de9047664ce751fd0bcbc78:b5c6a0c3-4ab5-45a2-ac3f-41c891e0994b

When that is done the first part is the Zap is done – getting links from Tagpacker.

Now we need to do a small operation before we continue with the Zap setup

Open a new tab and head over to your Google Drive and create a brand new Google Sheet and add three column names, like this:

Alright, so when that is done we can continue the Zap setup and connect to our newly created Google Sheet.

The first part of this is easy and should look like this.

The next step is to map your Google Sheet and Tagpacker fields together, the end result should look like this.

Now you should be able to test your Zap and get your first data into the Google Sheet.

And there you have it, you can now turn on your Zap and links will automatically end up in your Google Sheet like this:

4. Getting emails

We have now established an easy and semi-automatic way to save websites to a Google Sheet. The next step is to find the email addresses we need to do for our email outreach campaigns.

First off, go and register for an account on hunter.io. Which is an online service for finding emails based on domain names.

YAMM will take data from your Google Sheet, in my case email, pitch and name.

The pitch and name field will be used in my template. The template YAMM uses can be created as a draft email.

For example:

And in the Google Sheets this is the data I have prepared:

Next up is to start YAMM from the add-ons menu and click your way to this screen. Here you will need to choose which email template (draft) that you are going to use and your sender name.

Then you should always do a test email to yourself, but if that looks good, then just click the send button.

Here is what I received in my example:

Here you can see that the name and pitch were picked from what was typed in in the Google Sheet.

Another option is to use the campaign feature in hunter.io. A nice thing they have over there is the option to automatically set follow-up emails if you don’t get any reply. But for this to work, you will have to manually export from the Google Sheet and import into hunter.io.

6. Tips for your outreach campaign

As a final note, here are 10 great tricks to consider when doing your email outreach campaign.